Stress-free productivity does exist

In addition to your usual and familiar routines and daily work tasks, you surely have in your to-do lists a handful of tasks that will require a certain level of creativity to get done (and sometimes, a lot of creativity will be necessary). These tasks can be hazardous to your productivity. On the one hand, if you don’t feel very creative, you may put these tasks off. On the other hand, though, these more unusual and creative-oriented tasks are often the ones you will want to do the most in those moments when you feel especially lucid, and this can become a detriment to your ability to accomplish other tasks that may be more important at the time but which don’t seem as interesting or fun.

Perfection can kill your intention to implement changes and make things that lead you to a better situation. Many of my blog readers tell me how hard it is to apply GTD for them. They become desperate for not reaching the levels David Allen describe in his book. My answer is always the same: just start to implement it, then refine the details slowly but steadily. Find something you can improve in each stage of the process, small changes that do not involve too much difficulty. If you are able to chain these little improvements, the return obtained will be spectacular. Here are some suggestions to get you started:

A core concept of GTD is that the control of our daily activity (task and project management), to make sense and be done efficiently, it must be governed by a broader perspective (responsibilities, goals, vision and life purpose).

This week, an article fell into my hands and attracted my attention, since the author speaks about laziness—or at least, a certain kind of laziness—from a very positive perspective. Although the article is specifically about why application users try to not complicate their lives, I think the bottom line can be applied broadly to the phenomenon of productivity.

As the first post of this series, I will explain how I manage, a la GTD, the articles and news I want to read, without interrupting my work.